Animation

Yup, it’s almost Christmas. Meaning there’s Christmas stuff you can watch on TV, the internet, your phone or some futuristic machine that hasn’t been invented yet that you’re reading this on at the moment. Or you could actually be spending time with your family or loved ones, because that’s a Christmas thing you can do. Anyway, this week Balena Productions made another Sonic Christmas cartoon, some of our staff did commentary on a different Sonic Christmas cartoon and cool music guy Falk made a thing. Also some other stuff including:

Ryo Hazuki found a way to make vehicles out of arcade cabinets and will be racing around in Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed while playing Outrun at the same time sometime in the future [It was a leak so shush don’t tell SEGA]

Another couple of classic SEGA games got a 3D revamp on 3DS this week, this time Streets of Rage and Shinobi III [Fantasy Zone next please]

In celebration of the holiday season, I (Barry the Nomad), David the Lurker and Bartman settle in around the fireplace, sip eggmanog, and enjoy two episodes of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. The first is the holiday special “Sonic Christmas Blast”, which released three years after the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog aired. The special was planned to be titled “An X-Tremely Sonic Christmas” to tie in with Sonic X-treme. But when X-treme was scrapped, the title was changed to tie in with Sonic 3D Blast.

The second bonus episode is entitled “Sno Problem”, a wintery themed adventure that sees Sonic and Tails taking on Robotnik who has unleashed his Ultra Freeze-O-Matic on mobius. His grand scheme? Watch and find out!

Variety has reported that actor Christopher Evan Welch, the voice of Miles “Tails” Prower in The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon series, has passed away at the age of 48*. Welch voiced Tails in all 65 episodes of the series alongside Jaleel White’s Sonic and Long John Baldry’s Robotnik (Baldry passed away in 2005).

Welch’s other TV credits include AMC’s Rubicon, The Sopranos, The Practice, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: SVU and The Good Wife. Welch also appeared in several movies including Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and Lincoln, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

As a Sonic fan who tape recorded every single episode of the series as they aired, Welch’s death really is heartbreaking. His voice acting really shaped the character of Tails in those early days when he was a silent sidekick in the games, and was relegated to a smaller role in the Saturday morning Sonic series. All of us at Sonic Retro send our thoughts to Welch’s family and friends.

*Despite many entertainment outlets stating that Welch was likely 48, this doesn’t jive with his child-like voice in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. At 48 now, Welch would be 28 in 1993. But given puberty has been the presumed cause for Welch not appearing in Sonic Christmas Blast in 1996, he would have been closer to 11 which matches with a 1983 birthdate floating around. And yet, the Seattle Times shows a photo from 1993 featuring a man much older than 11. So either Welch was much older and could do a great child voice, and did not appear in the Christmas special for other reasons, or something else is not matching up.

And by animu I only mean Kill la Kill. It’s a show in which school uniforms give people powerful powers and there’s different tiers of powerful school uniforms and it’s made by the same guys who made Gurren Lagann. Go watch Kill la Kill you guys. Also some big Sonic stuff happened.

Retro/Bits News

Forum member Jayextee is making his own neat-looking game called [SLAVE]

George, Barry and Bartman did a commentary on Shenmue the Movie [SEGA Cinema]

The SEGAbits The Cave contest ends tomorrow, you can still enter and try to win some stuff [Contest]

Speaking of The Cave, here’s an interview with Ron Gilbert by [SEGAbits]

SEGA just suddenly announced that there will be a new comedic CG animated series called Sonic Boom. This show will be Sonic’s fifth cartoon on TV, but if this teaser image is anything to go by this will be the first to heavily change the character designs. I can’t be the only one getting flashbacks to Loonatics Unleashed…

Sonic Boom will air during the fall of 2014, with the first season consisting of 52 eleven-minute episodes. The cartoon is being produced by SEGA of America and Genao Productions. You can read the full press release after the jump for more info. Continue Reading

When I was a spry, young lad, I could still wake up every Saturday morning at the crack of dawn. Filled with exuberance for a block of time that would soon be lost to the ages with the popularization of children’s programming on basic cable, I would arise to make sure I wouldn’t miss a second of what was to be broadcast. Fox Kids, One Saturday Morning, Kids WB, even the not-aimed-at-me TNBC block…from local programming to the last remnants of syndicated tales involving the Hardy Boys, my elementary years were spent absorbing half hour after half hour of useless information.

On this day twenty years ago – September 18th, 1993 for those who aren’t paying attention – my focus was once again squarely on the television. Sitting in bed like I did every Saturday, my eyes glazed over watching my tiny moving picture box, the same one that I had played hours upon hours of the original Sonic the Hedgehog titles. But that day was something special. Something tremendously exciting. What was it? Well, the cast of Hanging With Mr. Cooperkindly told me the night before during T.G.I.F…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, and by that I mean not go to Sonic-related websites in the past few days, you know that Eddie Lebron released his Sonic fan film last week. And if you’ve seen you’ll probably think that it’s impressive for a low-budget fan project or that it’s crap. Or you actually have a different opinion than the majority of the internet, but that’d just be silly. Anyway monday links.

Sonic Retro News

Missed the community stream we did last Friday? It’s fully archived on Youtube along with a first look stream we did a while back. [Youtube]

Dario released a new version of SonicGMI for Sonic Generations. [SonicGMI]

Something that I missed last week, Mercury is working on a Sonic engine for in Game Maker called AeStHete (An excellent Sonic the Hedgehog engine that’s editable). [AeStHete Engine Thread]

Sonic/SEGA News

The first details on the PC version of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed got revealed and the game is up for pre-purchased on services like Steam. [ASRT PC]

Planning on getting Aliens: Colonial Marines for PC? You’ll probably want to know the system requirements. Also like All-Stars Racing Transformed, it can now be pre-purchased from Steam. [AVPGalaxy]

Disney recently released a new trailer of Wreck-It Ralph, which features Sonic desperately trying to look cool by doing an old pose he did for Sonic 2006. Eggman appears on the poster as well along with other characters like Qbert, Zangief, M. Bison and Qbert. You can click on the poster on the left for a bigger version.

Sonic appears in the new trailer as well. You can see that one here. He only appears of like one second so blink and you might miss him. He also appears in a different scene in the Japanese trailer for an even shorter amount of time. He appears at about the 0:36 timestamp. In the scene it looks like he joined a party with a bunch of characters from the fictional game the main character of the movie comes from, Fix-It Felix Jr. You can see Wreck-It Ralph in theaters from November 2nd.

UPDATE: Disney has released four more posters for the movie, with one of them having Sonic front and center and another one with Eggman standing behind M. Bison. Another one of the posters also has that rhino boss from AlteredBeast, so that’s neat. Also, yes Sonic does actually look kinda cool in the new poster, but my point that he is desperately trying to do so still stands! You can see the new posters in the gallery below.

It’s no surprise that Sonic will have a cameo in Disney’s upcoming movie Wreck-It Ralph. With so many classic videogame characters appearing in it Sonic was bound to be included, especially with Eggman making an appearance as well. Now we’ve got a confirmation that he’s not just going to sit or walk by like a lot of the cameos.

At the Comic-Con panel for Wreck-It Ralph the first 10 minutes of the film were shown, and in those 10 minutes a PSA was shown with Sonic explaining that if a game character dies in a game that’s not their own they die for good. Seemingly a reference to the Sonic Sez segments from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. There’s no confirmation on who will be voicing Sonic in the movie, we already know that Zangief (from the Street Fighter games) isn’t voiced by his normal voice actor in the movie so there’s some doubt on if Roger Craig Smith will be playing the role.

You can expect to see Wreck-It Ralph in theaters from November 2nd, 2012 in the US.